Happy Sunday!

About Mitch Nick

Ruby and AngularJS Developer

My name is Mitch Nick and I'm a full stack developer who builds web applications in Ruby and AngularJS, with a preference for Ruby on Rails. My career started at Deloitte tailoring Sales and Marketing technologies for really large companies. In my free-time there I set the vision which overhauled Deloitte's global and US innovation programs. In 2012, I left to focus 100% on programming and haven't looked back.

I work on all sorts of projects - whether you are a new startup looking to get an MVP off the ground or an established company looking to add some development capacity.

Early Startups:
I can help guide you through the early stages of project planning, understand your users needs, develop the information architecture and overall user experience, find the right design to leverage for your website and finally build out the working product. I'm especially talented at helping set the vision for the MVP, allowing your application to get to paying customers as fast as possible.

Shopify App Development:
I have my second Shopify App getting ready to launch on the Shopify App Store. I can help you translate your business idea for the App store and build a custom app which will be accessible for all 800,000 stores on Shopify.

I'm currently working remotely, but my previous home was Minneapolis. Wherever I am, I try to help people understand Nick can be a last name.

My philosophy: Save clients time and money without sacrificing quality

I believe in leveraging existing web frameworks and our previous code versus rebuilding the wheel from scratch. This saves my clients both time and money. Need a login which incorporates Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn for your site? This is more of a copy and paste problem versus starting completely from scratch. Looking for a website which is easy for you to administer and add content to in the future? I'll pull in an established and well maintained Ruby gem (re: add-on / extension) to create the backend administration site in just a couple of hours. Looking to get an MVP off the ground? We'll build out a rough wireframe and leverage a beautiful design on wrapbootstrap. Looking to build a mobile app? Let's leverage Ionic so we have one codebase which creates an iOS and Android app.

All the team enjoyed working with Mitch. They all respected his technical expertise, opinion and his willingness to listen when other people’s opinion was different from his own. With me, Mitch’s communication was right where it needed to be. He brought the appropriate questions to the right people, and kept his questions for me to the strategic variety. He also did a good job of pestering me when he needed me to look at something, which is appreciated and can be needed at times in a project.

Mitch’s code was well organized and he did a great job of test coverage. His approach to solving problems was a nice balance of not being too complex or too simple; he didn’t jump through hoops he didn’t need to. Speaking to the Full Stack, from some hard core database issues to javascript issues, Mitch did a great job of jumping in. If there was an issue he didn’t know how to solve, he had a great approach for trying to figure out a solution. Whether it involved learning or getting other people involved, he was always great at troubleshooting.

Overall, Mitch is great to work with and would definitely love to hire him again.

Projects

CITIZEN OBSERVER

Tip411 by Citizen Observer

Site which helps citizens submit anonymous to law enforcement agencies. Site was built and designed for three separate user groups. Citizens can log in and subscribe to city alerts via text message or email. Mitch was the main developer on the project which was a re-build from scratch.

GROUPS360

Grouponomics by Groups360

Helps hoteliers become more efficient in their sales process. Mitch was the main developer, building out two separate JSON APIs to communicate with the AngularJS front end. Postgres, Redis and Elasticsearch were leveraged to make the backend lightning quick while handling a large data set.

IDEAL ENERGIES

iDEAL Energies

Ideal Energies installs solar panels across the state of Minnesota. They were having a difficult time keeping track of all of their installations. We built a custom website to not only manage their installations, but to help run their entire business. We pull in data from their solar panels (two different APIs) nightly to analyze which sites are performing as expected and what sites need an onsite visit for service.

ReturnsForSale

Shopify App: ReturnsForSale

A Shopify App to help stores sell their returned goods. Returned items can be reposted online in less than 60 seconds and the price will drop every day until the product is sold. Eliminates a massive headache for several Shopify stores. Application deeply leverages the Shopify API to build a seamless experience.

E4EFFORT

E4 Effort

A tool to help teachers grade student participation and effort in class. Built an iOS and Android powered app leveraging one code base in Ionic. The web app has a reporting page and accomodates six different login roles - from system and district admins, down to students and guardians. This is still in development (including logo), but is scheduled to launch soon.

TRIPSIO

Tripsio

Tripsio is a fast and easy way to discover and share your life experiences online with your friends and family. A cross between tripadvisor.com and medium.com. Site is currently under construction; leveraging Rails, Elasticsearch, a location API service and several front end technologies.

KINETIC DATA

Kinetic Data

Built a stand alone application to speed up the process Federal Companies launch their AWS instance. Site integrates with the main Kinetic Data application and builds all forms from custom temlates provided by Amazon. Yep, it's as techy as it all sounds.

MIDDLE WEST

Middle West Management Admin System

Built a backend system to manage information for this artist management firm. Not only is the application going to make their day to day life easier, they hope it will attract more artist managers and artists to their firm. Their current artist portfolio includes grammy award winner Bon Iver.

LAWPLICITY

Lawplicity

A 99 designs for law firms. When a lawfirm needs a template for a law document, they can post a request to lawplicity.com and buyers will respond with potential solutions to purchase. Mitch built the core of the design and several of the complex features.

PT SHOW

The Paul Thomas Show

Paul Thomas Show is a podcast site for a client with aspirations to be a radio personality. The site was built leveraging Wordpress to make it easy for Paul to update the site moving forward. In total less than 10 hours of development time was needed to make this beautiful site thanks to a well picked out theme. Since the creation of hte site, Paul landed a job as a radio personality with BOB FM.

When I started looking for a development partner, we met with a multitude of different companies. Mitch related instantly to the project we had in mind and understood our project goals. He was able to put the project into terms all members of our team, including those with limited tech backgrounds, could understand. Once we started working together, he set us up with the tools necessary to keep track of the project in real time.

Mitch brought focus to a very large idea, worked within our budget / timeline and ultimately brought it all to life. It’s been just a short period of time since launch, and the application has already been extremely useful in our everyday work. He definitely helped us reach our main goal of taking 50% of our work out of the inbox. I can only imagine as we continue, the tool will bring our company even more in sync with all of our different managers across the country.

Working with Mitch has been great and we will certainly be calling him when we are ready to start with Phase 2.

Josh Sundquist
General Manager for Middle West Management

Working with groups

Even though I work as an independent programmer, I find myself working in groups a large portion of the time. Leveraging git, it has never been easier for a team of programmers to work on an application together and deliver you an outstanding end product. Depending on your project needs and timeline, there are numerous different people I enjoy working with.

Conor

UX Expert and lover of all things internet. He scours the web for the best user experiences and leverages the best of each to create seamless user experiences. Previously worked as a UX Designer for a local consulting firm. Conor lives in Saint Paul and enjoys spending time with his black lab Dempsey and growing his startup.

Timmer

Resident Angular JS expert. Originally got his start on the web as a world class film editor and now spends his time building out websites for his fortunate clients. Timmer grew up in Saint Paul but current spends his time down in Austin, TX, and loves to remind us all how great the weather is there during the winter.

Jake

An expert Ruby developer that loves to play with science, math and gadgets. He's been a part of a startup which was acquired by Facebook (which is pretty awesome) and countless web projects in general. Jake grew up in Iowa and currently lives in Minneapolis with his wife, 2 dogs and son.

Mikhail

Ruby programmer stud located in Ukraine and back end expert. It was not easy to find someone as talented as Mikhail. I scoured through hundreds of individuals abroad to find an individual who writes quality code meant to scale and is enjoyable to work with. I bring in Mikhail (or someone like him) when it's important to lower the overall rate.

You!

I love coming in and being a member of your team. I can travel to your location (even if it's not in Minnesota) to work with your development team and / or designers. You'll find I have the appropriate amount of communication and am a great team member.

Mitch is great to work with and willing to do whatever needs to be done. He was able to provide pieces of functionality very, very quickly that I needed but wasn’t capable of doing on my own. He also helped me learn ruby on rails, css and a whole other host of things so I could do the work on my own. He was very patient throughout the process while also being upbeat and fun to work with.

When I needed something, he was there. Very quick to give a full fledged answer. Sometimes I didn’t even know what I was asking but I would get the right answer anyway.

When I need help or have new work I will be calling Mitch first.

Elizabeth Psihos
Lawplicity Founder

Contact Information

Enough about me, time to start talking about you. My contact information is listed below or you can contact me via this handy form. I look forward to hearing from you.